Live-Streaming the Newly Serious Katy Perry

To promote the release of her new album, “Witness”, Katy Perry has moved into an apartment outfitted with forty-one cameras and is continuously live-streaming her activities.

PHOTOGRAPH BY NEILSON BARNARD / GETTY

Of all the new American pop stars, Katy Perry has always seemed the most resolutely human to me, in part because she appears constantly on the verge of a good guffaw. Perry, who was born Katheryn Hudson, in 1984, is one of the best-selling musical artists of all time. She is, at present, the most followed person on Twitter (next comes Justin Bieber, and then Barack Obama). Her third and finest studio album, “Teenage Dream,” from 2010, produced five No. 1 singles. The first and only other artist to do this was Michael Jackson, in 1987. Perry’s approach was puckish and winking from the start, a cavalcade of Technicolor inanity, delivered airily: bras that spritzed whipped cream, a giant mechanical cat that she deftly rode around a football stadium during her Super Bowl halftime show, and, of course, the make-you-think lyric “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?” Unlike her peers Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé, Perry seemed largely incapable of sustained self-seriousness. She was forever in on the joke. She was free.

In the last year, though, Perry has made several gestures toward gravity. She campaigned aggressively for Hillary Clinton, and performed at the Grammy Awards wearing a pantsuit and an armband that spelled out “PERSIST” in pink rhinestones. At the end of her appearance, she joined hands with her collaborator, the rapper Skip Marley, before a projection of the U.S. Constitution. She had a defiant look on her face, as if saying, “Can you believe I thought of this?”

Earlier that night, Perry had said that she hoped “Chained to the Rhythm,” the first single from her newest album, “Witness,” might “start conversations.” Yet the song was produced by Max Martin, the Swedish songwriter revered for his use of so-called “melodic math” (which allows him to engineer, with precision, an endless stream of palatable pop songs), and it does not deliver an especially provocative message, beyond warning against political blindness (“So comfortable, we’re living in a bubble, bubble / So comfortable, we cannot see the trouble, trouble”). It is hard to begrudge anyone her activism, no matter how glancing it may seem. But when “Chained to the Rhythm” failed to become the “We Shall Overcome”-style protest anthem that Perry envisioned it to be, I was not surprised.

The next two singles from “Witness,” which was released in full last Friday, felt, respectively, petty (“Swish Swish,” a rebuke to Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood,” itself an absurdist tantrum born from some nonsensical scrap over backup dancers) and unimaginatively salacious (“Bon Appétit,” an ode to carnality instantly destroyed—like many things—by food metaphors). The rest of the album is similarly leaden. Perry somehow sounds both careful and craven, unwilling to venture much yet demanding a lot.

On Thursday night, to promote the album’s release, Perry moved into an apartment outfitted with forty-one cameras; since then, she has been continuously live-streaming her activities to her YouTube channel. The grand finale will take place on Monday afternoon, with a concert for a batch of pre-selected fans. The space she’s presently occupying, in Los Angeles, looks like a stylized assemblage of every loft used to film MTV’s “The Real World,” though elements of it also remind me, on occasion, of the Red Room from “Twin Peaks.” The project was sponsored by the cosmetics company CoverGirl, which recently teamed with Perry for an advocacy campaign: #projectPDA, or Public Display of Application, which challenges “the stigma of applying makeup in public.”

I find it difficult to imagine that this is actually a grave concern for anyone—I thought that the culture had reached a very beautiful concordance about the idea of containing all of our grooming routines within the home, for the love of everything sweet and holy!—but the idea that a modern woman can simultaneously care about public garniture and the spiritual future of the United States is an essential tenet of contemporary feminism. In an era in which intolerance is policed more than anything else, self-care of any sort is granted tremendous credence: if it makes you feel better, we will honor it. Perry herself is a champion of this sort of thinking. Every urge or practice is O.K. and should be protected—as long as you’re being true to yourself.

So far, Perry’s live-stream has included transcendental meditation with the teacher and guru Bob Roth, yoga with the actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson, of “Modern Family,” cooking with the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey, and frequently admitting that she has failed to brush her teeth. When I first tuned in to the broadcast, a little before midnight Eastern Standard Time, on Friday night, Perry was lounging on a round bed with the d.j. Mia Moretti and the model Cleo Wade, alongside a teddy bear and a copy of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Astrophysics for People in A Hurry.” They were discussing the weirdness of their situation.

“Like, all reality is scripted now. So to have a real reality thing . . .,” one of the women said.

“I know this sounds insane, but live streaming is, like, the most present form of media. If you’re present, I guess,” Perry said.

Soon, the pop star Sia was at the door, her hair in a bun, wearing one of those fake-nose-and-glasses get-ups. “Are you living here now?” she asked. “I can’t believe you’re doing this. This is amazing.”

“It’s insane,” Perry said.

Sia turned to one of the other women and said, inexplicably, “I remember you from the pool. You said or did something remarkable.” Later, Sia admitted that she couldn’t actually drink from her glass of strawberry-flavored sparkling water because of her disguise. “I don’t suppose you have any straws, do you?” she asked.

Then the model and burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese and the actress Anna Kendrick joined the group. “Oh, my Goddess!” Perry shrieked when she saw Kendrick. “I love this red light,” Kendrick said, referring to the set. “I feel like we’re gonna get it on any second.” A very young-looking woman named Camilla appeared—it seemed that she had won some sort of contest—and stood there, unabashedly terrified. She was Brazilian, and had only been in the United States for a few years. Perry reassured her. “Are you okay? Breathe in.” Eventually, Patty Jenkins, the director of “Wonder Woman,” stopped by. She was the last guest to take a seat at an artfully appointed banquet table.

The women were served a first course of avocado toast and kale salad. “Welcome to Witness Worldwide,” Perry said to her guests. “I know it seems like it’s just us, but it’s not, it’s the whole world. And they’re here, but it’s fine, it’s O.K., be yourselves.”

Wade, the model, whom the Cut once described as “an Instagram poet” and “the Millennial Oprah?,” addressed the group: “I’m going to open up the space by setting an intention for the dinner.” She asked every woman present to recount “a rose and a thorn”—some joy, some remonstrance—about her transition from girlhood into womanhood. I found the directive flustering, as, I suspect, did several of Perry’s guests, who looked bewildered. The idea was to revel in the particular accomplishments of women, but, based on the comments scrolling adjacent to the video stream (“What is the kind of this food?”; “How long is this going to go on lol”; “yoga”), few viewers were looking for lessons about empowerment or solidarity.

What were they there for instead? This sort of experiment, in which strangers are granted ostensibly unmediated access to a person’s private domestic life, is compelling only for its promise of accidental revelations—not for what a person does when she knows that someone is watching but for the funny and honest things she does when she forgets.

The problem with Perry is that she no longer forgets. Earlier on Friday, she broadcast part of her therapy session with Dr. Siri Sat Nam Singh, the star of “The Therapist,” a new television series on Viceland. I’ve written before about the thorny idea of performative therapy, but Perry’s confessions—that she has abused alcohol, that she has had thoughts of suicide, that she recently cut all her hair off because she didn’t want to “look like Katy Perry anymore”—felt premeditated. There is an obvious benefit to having conversations like this in public (perhaps it might inspire a troubled fan to make comparable confessions to a mental-health professional), but, when they’re plainly staged in service of an album launch, it feels less like an act of altruism or epiphany than cynical calculation.

Every moment of “Witness Worldwide” I saw felt heavy with promotional intention, and low on spontaneity or frankness—which is also what makes the album itself a slog. Perry no longer feels like our girl on the inside, narrating the applesauce of fame. Instead, she is constantly courting it, nurturing it, and protecting it. Perhaps, once an artist has enjoyed the kind of colossal success that Perry has seen, she becomes justly worried about any sort of defeat or regression, but terror at the prospect of failure is toxic for art. It also makes for exceptionally tedious viewing.